HOW MAJOR CORP'S. PARTNERING WITH
GOV'T. PLAN TO TRACK YOUR EVERY MOVE

By Mary Starrett
November 5, 2005NewsWithViews.com

When
Harvard doctoral candidate and privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht started
sniffing around the halls of MIT and got her mittens on some major corporation’s
internal memos she discovered an Orwellian plan that she wasted no time
trying to warn us about.

Big
companies are spying on us.

The
founder of C.A.S.P.I.A.N. (Consumers Against Privacy Invasion and Numbering)
has compiled the disturbing evidence in a book. Within days of being
published “Spychips” shot to the top of amazon.com’s non-fiction list.
It’s no wonder; calling the book the “Devil’s Dictionary for RFID”,
WIRED.COM’s Bruce Sterling said: “If you’ve never heard of RFID or “spychips”
it would be quite a good idea to read this book pretty soon… Hurry.
Waste not another precious moment.” Sterling calls Albrecht and her
co-author Liz McIntyre “the Lone Ranger and Tonto of the RFID frontier…
computerized super female consumer advocates of tomorrow…two loud, flamboyant,
irrepressible Internet activists, researching and publishing the secretive,
business-confidential” of how corporations and government are tracking
our every move.

Bottom
line is this: Tiny,
traceable chips are in stuff we buy, right now. It’s a creepy concept
and very 1984-ish, but it’s reality and we’d better get a bead on the
current and planned-for applications of the simple, little technology
with big privacy invasion potential. This book primes the pump for a
huge consumer backlash, because leviathan corporations have gone to
great lengths to make sure consumers don’t find out how extensively
RFID technology is being (secretly) used and promoted. Big companies
like Wal Mart, Proctor& Gamble, Exxon- Mobil, Benneton, Philips, Gillette,
Max Factor…. to name a few, and, as you might expect the federal government
are already using traceable chips all the better to spy on you with,
my dear.

The
book “Spychips”
is well-documented, easy to read and immensely entertaining. The authors
treat a serious subject with humor, and you don’t have to be a techie
to get it (having just mastered ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ I am proof of that.)
“Technology…is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand
and stabs you in the back with the other”. -- C.P. Snow, New York Times,
1971

“Spychips”
details a world of no more privacy “where your every purchase is monitored
and recorded in a database and your every belonging is numbered.” The
book outlines how RFID is being used in medications Viagra and Oxycontin
and how the FDA is pushing for RFID on all prescriptions. [Spychips
is a book that everyone should have. Order "SpyChips"]

Naming
Names

“Spychips”
is in essence saying “I’m telling” to major corporations like Proctor
& Gamble and Gillette. P&G’s Lipfinity lipstick’s been tagged with live
RFID chips (at one time the company even surreptitiously videotaped
women as they picked out their favorite shade sending live pictures
back to corporate voyeurs thousands of miles away.) Gillette placed
an order for 500 million RFID tags and was busted after secretly placing
the devices in Mach3 razors. Add these products to the list of RFID-tagged
consumer goods like Pantene Shampoo, Purina Dog Chow and Huggies baby
wipes.

In
Spychips we learn the fascinating history of RFID. It had its origins,
Albrecht and McIntyre tell us, with a Russian spy named Lev Termen.
Termen (aka Theramin) used sold-out concerts in New York’s Metropolitan
Opera House to actually relay intelligence information back to the Soviets.
Based on that technology an RFID bug was later hidden in a wooden plaque
of the Great Seal of the United States and presented to U.S.

Ambassador
Averell Harriman by Russian school children in 1945. The spychipped
plaque hung in the ambassador’s office giving up Cold War secrets until
it was discovered in 1952. At the time, American spooks hadn’t a clue
what this RFID technology was. Now, not only have they since figured
it out, but government, along with global corporations is now using
it to spy on the American people.

“Spychips”
explains that, with funding from P&G, Gillette, and the Uniform Code
Council (the bar code folks), the MIT Auto-ID Center became the proving
ground for RFID and all its invasive applications back in 1999. In no
time the Center’s goal was to see RFID tags on every manufactured item
with a single, global network to track them. For instance, the nosey
folks at IBM have been working on ways to track people in libraries
and elevators. ( And you thought Muzak was ubiquitous!)

Function
Creep

The
technology that yesterday enabled manufacturers to keep track of pallets
of shipped goods is already being proposed for decidedly more invasive
applications. One patent application describes a “sniffer” or RFID reader
which would be used on the doorway of homes and cars to inventory the
consumer’s spychipped items and send the results to marketers. The book
points out that as with everything related to RFID, the motive is to
spy on us for marketing purposes.

The
potential for the government’s abuse of this technology is discussed
as well. Albrecht and McIntyre write that “far from protecting the public
from the RFID threat, our government is actively promoting the technology…
the department of Defense and the United States Postal Service…” were
sponsoring members of the Frankenstein laboratory –like Auto ID Center.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration
“are both encouraging RFID adoption through their recently issued “track
and trace” guidelines”.

RFID
chips in “smart guns”, schoolchildren being “tagged” for “security…the
list is getting longer all the time.

Can
You Say: “Schnuffelchippen”?

That’s
the German word for “spychips” or RFID tracking devices. Germans were
up in arms when they recently found out the “loyalty” cards they carried
for the Metro Future Store contained spychips. The grocery store was
forced to recall more than ten thousand cards it had issued to unwitting
shoppers and that was just the beginning.

Massive
protests, testimony before government committees and media interviews
decrying the deception followed. Consumer backlash can be ugly. German
consumers did not take kindly to being tracked.

“Spychips”
reminds us “(i)n the dark days of Germany’s Third Reich, Jewish people
had become the hunted. The only way they could escape deportation to
Nazi death camps was by fleeing the country, hiding or blending in…”
In other words, those who survived had discarded their yellow stars
of David marking them as Jude, the symbol that made it easy to spot
them and keep track of them. No doubt if the Nazis had had RFID their
“final solution” would have made any escapes impossible.

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Katherine
Albrecht and Liz McIntyre have managed to ferret out the dirty, little
secret that’s so far managed to remain hidden.

Mary Starrett was on television for 21 years
as a news anchor, morning talk show host and medical reporter. For the
last 5 years she hosted a radio program. Mary is a frequent guest on radio
talk shows.